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User blog:Donny da Die-ger/Writing Like Hotline: Simplicity and Implication in Subway
Sorry if this comes across as rambling, but I'd like to talk about how Hotline Miami tells stories so that maybe you can tell them as well as it did, and eventually maybe even better. Making community content means you're probably going to be writing dialogue at some point. You can do that however you want, but the goal of this post it to help explain how the MAIN SERIES did it. First of all, I think the best writing in the series is in Hotline Miami 2's Subway mission. The Fans have just died, and the player is wondering what the hell the game's even about now. This is the emotional thrust of the scene: Other characters are buried in flashbacks, and Pardo just killed the Fans and we all hate him now. Evan is the only one left at this point in the story who we both almost fully understand and possibly side with. The dialogue itself is a very clever Richard sequence that plays on Evan's bleeding heart and lack of priorities. These are CONCRETE FACTS about Evan. Evan literally is choosing danger and crazy leads over sensible family man activities that would be safer and more profitable. He's doing this for maybe not the best reasons and is ignoring what matters in his own life, and this shows up in the scene itself. When the Hobo asks for change, Evan extends out green bills, much more than asked for, and an apparition of Richard and his wife berate him for not having enough of that money to even pay bills. Evan is making bad decisions, and it will cost him his family and he knows it. But he desperately tries to rationalize why the player themselves is playing the game: because the story is going to be good. It's important to understand that at almost all junctures the player character's sentiments and dialogue are supposed to reflect what the player themselves is feeling at that point of the game. This was very obvious with Biker in HM1 and it continues with many of HM2's characters as well. When Evan is desperately justifying his book, he's also the player desperately justifying Subway as a level at all. When he's ignoring his real life to do Subway, so is the player. It's a pretty simple and clever trick that helps characters feel like their reactions are genuine and not just putting words in the player's mouth. The implications are another thing to take note of. In HM2 we almost never see Evan with his family, which is to imply that he doesn't spend actual time with them and is instead engulfed in his work. We see from his house that he has children due to the child's bedroom with the NES, TMNT toys and toy guns. We infer from the fact that the bed is made for two that Evan is currently sleeping with his wife and not his work, as we'll later see in Act 5. When Richard speaks forebodingly to Evan in the intro, that foreboding is GROUNDED in ACTUAL EVENTS THAT WILL OCCUR IF THE PLAYER CONTINUES. "Time is the one thing you don't have, maybe you should reconsider your priorities?" is actually a straight moral of the series stated flatly, but it sounds almost like a threat so you want to see what exactly he means. The ending of the game reveals what he meant: everyone is going to die. Everyone in general, both in real life and the game. But until that lesson is learned by the player and Evan, Evan is confused with the player. What does Richard mean exactly, we're left thinking. The idea to have Sharon only appear as a freaky apparition is also a very interesting writing choice. Because she's relaying stressful information, information that disrupts Evan's life (I'll leave you, I'll take the kids and Leave), the situation itself doesn't make sense. A hobo with her head is actually insane because to Evan facing the consequences of his own tunnel vision is insane. It works surprisingly well and the player is left offput as Evan is. The outro with Rosa is a great example of playing with lack of player information. We don't know who this woman is, even though Evan clearly does, so that we ourselves can be desperate for information to find out what's going on. What was Subway for? To meet an old lady who doesn't know anything? To get these cassette tapes with these paltry dates on them? It's all very interesting and not very substantial, like you're missing something but can't explain what. That's the feeling Evan has writing his book: like Biker in HM1, Evan wants answers, and so do we. My favorite part of Subway's writing is easily The Bar ending to it with Biker. This sequence says so much about who Evan and Biker are, and the implications of what Biker says about the desert are actually so fun to think about that it could be a game (or mod) in itself. In this scene, Evan has all the answers. They're right in front of him in the form of this filthy, battered and drunk homeless man. But he has so much tunnel vision that he doesn't see that Biker is actually the substantial link that could in fact unravel the story. Biker himself is too impatient and angry and beaten to bear with Evan's insecurities, and the two talk completely past each other without learning anything at all. When Biker tries to talk about the masked killings, Evan thinks Biker means the war, which angers Biker because Evan isn't paying close enough attention. Possibly because Evan is distracted by his own encounter with Richard and his family troubles. When Evan asks if it was a conspiracy, Biker believes Evan is writing him off as a crackpot, and angrily tells him it was real, not a conspiracy. Little things like that really make the characters feel like people who do things as a function of who they are, not what a writer has planned for them. Category:Blog posts